Very Grumpy Man Robert De Niro Says He Doesn't Give a Fuck Who Some Tech Nerd Is

Robert de Niro won’t stand for condescension toward celebs, and recently gave a public rebuke to a tech CEO whose tone he didn’t like.

According to Page Six, here’s how it went down at the WSJ. Magazine Innovator Awards—not your usual hotspot for rumbles:

“We are a long way from San Francisco,” joked tech mogul Stewart Butterfield of hot app Slack, when he scanned the room of “supermodels and movie stars” including Karlie Kloss, Brad Pitt and Jared Leto, who gave him the award. Butterfield joked he was receiving the “nerd award” and pointed at De Niro, mentioning, “I watched ‘Godfather II’ on the plane . . . when you killed Don Fanucci, I liked that.”

De Niro, up next, growled, “Whoever the last speaker was . . . I thought you were a bit condescending to us actors . . . celebrities. I’m gonna go on record with you just to say that. And I don’t give a f – – k who you are.”

Well, that took a turn. (Though Vulture notes that Butterfield took it in stride, promptly tweeting, “I just literally got trash-talked by Robert De Niro. ‘I don’t know who the FUCK you are.’ #lifegoals.”)

This is not de Niro’s first act of public crotchetiness. For instance, in September, the Guardian reported that when he didn’t like the way an interview with Radio Times was going, perceiving it as too negative, he informed the reporter, “I’m not doing it, darling,” and bailed. (Though she noted it had been a long day of press interview after press interview, so she sympathized.) But that wasn’t exactly unprecedented, either—witness this 2006 GQ interview, in which he tries to get reporter Chris Heath to turn off his recorder.